Saturday, February 28, 2015

The
Los Angeles Times reported this
morning that “California voters overwhelming oppose a tuition increase at
University of California campuses, even if that forces the colleges to cut
spending or accept more out-of-state students who pay higher fees”.

The
poll also discovered that Californians believe that their state “has done a
poor job of making a college education affordable”, and think that California
Governor Jerry Brown is correct to call out the UC Regents and UC President for
their efforts to raise tuition.

The
poll finds California’s voters at their most typically obtuse and obdurate.They oppose tuition increases, but apparently
don’t realize that tuition increases have been necessary over the years because
they have refused to provide UC with sufficient funding, while simultaneously
asking the University to strive for excellence in research and public
service.

Taking
more students, and taking those students from an increasingly diverse state
costs money.Performing world class
research, preserving world class faculty, and maintaining world class campuses
require money.I hope that many
Californians would agree that those are worthwhile ambitions, in contrast to
the state’s half-witted Governor who wants a leaner, meaner university that
shoves students in and out the door, giving them a tattered product instead of
a rigorous learning experience.Brown is
dismissive of the UC’s research and its capacity to transform the lives and
livelihoods of Californians.Californians, I hope, feel differently.

But
if Californians agree that those ambitions are worthwhile—excellence in
education and research—they have a funny way of showing it.Older generations in particular—the very
people who attended UC for free or close to it—have consistently opposed
creating a tax system that would allocate sufficient funding to UC for the
institution to perform its mission for subsequent generations.Having climbed up a ladder constructed by
others to a position of success or at least security, those generations are now
breaking off the rungs to prevent younger Californians making the same ascent.

If
the state has done a poor job of making college affordable, that is to a large
degree because voters have rejected one effort after another to raise the
serious kind of revenue necessary to keeping UC truly public—that is, an
institution supported by the collective for the good of the state’s youth.

Voters
have not hesitated to discipline legislators and Governors who have argued for
the need to reinvest in our public sphere, and voters have conditioned
politicians in the state to steer clear of reforming the tax system or our
political structure, moves which are seen as assaults on the surplus wealth of
the upper-middle classes and the affluent—the people who, having benefited from
a vibrant public sphere in their youths, are now content to trash and de-fund
the same sphere.

UC
could certainly manage its resources more wisely.The past years have seen the unseemly
bloating of an administrative class, the primary purpose of which often seems
to shoot their institution in the foot by granting themselves outrageous
bonuses and pay raises at the same time that they raise tuition for students
and request more funds from the state.

The
basic immorality and strategic stupidity of the market approach adopted by UC’s
administration should not obscure the fact that cutting administrative salaries
would not make up for the systematic shortfall in public funding the system has
experienced over the years.

Voters
support Jerry Brown’s arguments about the University of California because
those are arguments that let them and the Governor—long a foe of public higher
education, in stark contrast to his father—off the hook for their serial
irresponsibility and their failure to maintain the system of higher education
that is in their trust.

But
many of those voters might support Brown because it has been so long since they
have been presented with any alternatives to the smaller, crueler state that
they live in today.It has been a long
time since the state experienced a political movement in favour of creating a
more communitarian California, one in which citizens realize that as a matter of
moral fact as well as of practicality, they have a responsibility to one
another and to future generations.

It
has been a long time since the state’s leadership expressed confidence in the
ability of the state government—the legislature, the executive, and the voters
who exercise outsized power through the state’s initiative process—to play an
active, respectful role in the lives of citizens, promoting the kinds of
institutions and investments that have the potential to lead to equality and
justice in California.I see no such
movements or leaders on the horizon, but students, staff, and faculty at
California’s universities should be thinking about how to work with those other
communities who suffer from the absence of equality and justice, and to forge
such a movement, to reclaim the state’s public sphere.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

It has taken nearly five years since Jerry Brown
launched his bid for his third term as Governor in 2010, but California’s
students have at last identified California’s prevaricating, irresponsible
executive as one of the primary stumbling blocks to the recovery of higher
education in the Golden State. The
Daily Cal reported that on Sunday,
“the University of California Student Association unanimously voted to pass a
resolution expressing no confidence in Gov. Jerry Brown”.

According to the Daily
Cal, the resolution “notes that over the last 24 years, state funding per
student of the university has declined, despite inflation. It also observes that Brown line-item vetoed
$100 million toward improving infrastructure of California state schools and
the UC system and that Brown supports expediting some degree programs and
increasing online education”.

In addition to condemning Brown’s efforts to
instrumentalise and cheapen California’s higher education system, the students
might have noted Brown’s serial refusal to use the powers at his disposal to
address the political and structural conditions that are driving UC towards
privatization and inaccessibility.

Like his Tea Party colleagues in Sacramento, with
whom he coasted to victory in 2010, Jerry Brown regards budgeting as an ends
rather than a means. A balanced budget
with minimal political risk is more important to the Governor than using that
budget to improve the lives of the Californians he ostensibly serves.

Like his Tea Party colleagues in Sacramento, with
whom he often has an easier relationship than with progressive Democrats, Jerry
Brown took a tax pledge, tying his hands and passing the buck to voters who
might have thought they elected the Governor to, well, govern. Unlike the Tea Party
cadres, who take their commands from Grover Norquist and the ghost of Howard
Jarvis (two sociopathic anti-tax advocates), Brown’s half-witted pledge was
self-imposed, and representative of the moral expediency with which he maneuvers
around Sacramento.

It is a pity that California’s students waited until
now to take Brown to task. Doing so
during the 2014 election campaign might have forced the Governor to publicly
set out his position on the future of higher education in California and made
the issue a point of contention in an election that Brown won easily without
deigning to lay out any plans before the public.

It is difficult to know what the most effective path
forward for California’s students is at this point. Five years ago students used protest to call attention
to the UC’s plight and to force administrators to roll back plans for an
unending barrage of fee increases.

Since 2011 it has proven difficult to foster the
student knowledge or generate the student interest necessary for significant or
effective protest. Letter-writing and
UC-sponsored advocacy campaigns have had little impact because they make no
allowance for the structural gridlock imposed by California’s mangled political
structure.

A popular, committed, progressive Governor could
potentially break-up that gridlock by campaigning for Democrats to help achieve
legislative supermajorities, sponsoring political reform, or making a flat out
push for the higher taxes necessary to make California—growing in size and
demographic complexity even as its revenue stagnates—a more humane and
responsible place.

Popular though he is, Jerry Brown has done none of
those things, and is unlikely to do them unless California’s students and citizens
put intense pressure on him and legislators, through traditional means, or
through more direct action.

Today, students face an administration bent on
increasing tuition unless it can persuade the intransigent Governor to send
more funds to UC, a Board of Regents intent on privatization, and a Governor
who simply doesn’t believe in the transformative capacity of higher education,
the need to fund a system of higher education, or the need for excellence in
research at a public university system.

Across the state line in Nevada, a Republican
Governor is taking an alternative approach, making a concerted push for tax
increases to shore up and develop the state’s education sector, recognizing the
health of such a sector as intimately connected to the health of the state’s
economy and society.

Governor Sandoval’s proposed taxes are nowhere near
the most progressive in the world, and he faces stiff opposition from the
demented fringe of the Republican Party, but on the issue of education, he is
proving himself more progressive than California’s slack-jawed, idle-minded
Governor, who ascribes to a policy of “Creative Inaction”.

California has taken about all that it can of the
Governor’s irresponsibility, and I hope that others will join with California’s
university students in condemning Brown’s cynical and right-wing approach to
some of the public institutions that can do the most good for the state.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.